I really disliked breath of the wild. Especially how empty it feels and how bad it looks, different strokes I guess.
How bad it looks? That game was pure art, it was like living in a painting.
It’s not a Zelda. I wish they hadn’t destroyed the franchise by removing the main mechanic, but they wouldn’t have been able to sell such a mid game without the draw of the franchise.
I would far rather have far fewer side quests with actual content instead of “collect 10 crickets” “collect 10 lizards.” I’d rather be in the dungeons solving puzzles than wandering around for tens of minutes looking for temples. I’d rather spend more time shooting arrows than looking for arrows.
If those are your complaints, I’m genuinely confused about what you think “real” Zelda games are. Zelda has always been so much more than dungeon crawling, but it seems like that’s all you care about. Plenty of other Zelda games had things that weren’t just dungeons (like horse riding, fishing, mini games, talking to characters, shopping, mini puzzles, etc.) and involved a fair bit of wandering and searching. Once you actually play BOTW and TOTK you don’t even really need to bother looking for arrows anymore, they’re fucking everywhere and you can buy them all over the place.
Sounds like you just aren’t a fan of Zelda, which is fine. But your claim that the recent games destroyed anything is just plain silly.
They’re completely different. Since you haven’t played them, the older games have a wide variety of interesting tools that unlocked a new area. Yes, exploration was linear, but things were fun and new instead of grinding out yet another segment of stamina bar to spend another several minutes climbing rock faces to get to more of the same glider/magnet/ice block puzzles.
If you think the new ones are the same type of thing at all you are willfully closing your eyes. It’s cool that you like a mid game about collecting various numbers of nearly indistinguishable plants and critters but I wish Nintendo had done it with a new franchise. It’s grating to have people claim they are Zelda fans when their favorite title is the soulless grinding entry.